THE TORRENT
(A.D. 1030)
Down the mountain side there went in long procession, slipping here and there upon the unbroken frost of the morning, jangling all of them with bells, mules by the hundred—quite three hundred mules.
They that led them were short, lean men with hard, clean-shaven faces, bronzed in colour, and on their heads they wore a loose, flat cap that hung to one side or the other. Each man led his beast, and each beast was heavily laden as it picked its way down the slope; and here and there, sitting sideways upon her mount, was a woman of these hills, holding in her arms a child. The sun had not yet risen behind the red earth of the eastern peaks. The broken road that had once been a passage for the Roman armies over the Pyrenees (and that was now a mere bank, unsurfaced, down which the mules warily shuffled) was touched everywhere with rime. For it was but the opening of summer, and the snow still lay everywhere upon the high mountains around.
At the head of the valley below, fixed in the narrow valley floor, lay huddled and tangled together such a little mass of dirty brown as looked like a fantastic chaos of rock. As one came closer one could see that it was a cluster of human buildings—a town, but a town so squeezed together, so suspicious of all around, so made for defence, that, seen from the pass above, it was like the shell of some armoured animal.
One street alone led through its houses, very narrow indeed (for up in these mountains nothing goes on wheels)—so narrow that two loaded mules could barely pass. And this narrow street, under the first glory of the morning sky, which made a strip of light above it, was full of the cries of sellers and of grooms, of the stamping of horses’ feet, and of the innumerable little jingles of steel which come from bit and bridle and curb, stirrup and scabbard and halter-chain, and the rings of mail upon a hauberk, wherever men are gathered together to ride out in arms.
For there was in this town an assembly made of farmers and free men and one or two lords as well. They had come for the beginning of the summer season, now that the crops were sown, to ride out south against the Mahommedan, to see what they could see, and take what they could take. It was for this force that the mules were coming over the hills to provision it. A great train did every such expedition need of servitors, and oats, bread twice baked, and salted meat tied tightly round with strings, olives also, and oil and much wine; four men, perhaps, afoot for one that fought on horseback; and many of those afoot were half slaves.
Under the low, thick arch, where the track came in through the town wall and became the narrow street of the town, swayed in the first of that long procession of mules. To the cries of the sellers and the grooms, and to the jingling of steel links, there was now added the music of little bells. But dominant over all such noises, louder than them all, and a background of sound upon which all this life was woven, was the torrent swollen with the melting snow that ran beyond the houses a few yards to the east, and filled the deep, cool valley with its rumour. The name of this torrent was Aragon.
Near a wide and ancient door of mouldering oak, that hid a deep, dark stable beyond, was a farmer from the Canal Roya upon his horse, and he talked to his lord.
“Those of Jaca, at the beginning of the plain, sent in a man last night to say that we could catch a few of them beyond the Peña, beyond the high hill. They camped on the slope of it, marauding. We should be upon them before the sixth hour. It is not many miles.”
But his lord, looking at the Peña where it stood, a grey wall miles away, answered him,—
“Their horses are swifter than ours, and they go very light without armour, God curse them!”
And he spat as he spoke of the Moslem.
Then the farmer said,—
“Two days ago they raided the farm of Peter, the free man, and took his four serfs away on halters, running behind their horses, and they burnt a rick of his, and behind them they left a coin. This coin I bought of Peter.”
He showed it. It was a coin of the mint of Saragossa, and the lord bent over his saddle and peered curiously at the Arabic script stamped upon it. Then he made the sign of the Cross slowly over his broad shoulders.
“These words,” he said, “are in the devil’s language, and with these they summon Mahound.”
“Sir,” said the farmer, “some day some men now mounted here will ride into Huesca and cleanse it of the infidel. There is a monk who lives alone, and is a hermit up on the Peña. The Mahommedans fear him and will not pass his cave, and God gives him knowledge in dreams. This man is very old, and this same Lent he said (when he came down into Jaca for the Adoration of the Cross and the Blessing of the Oils), this very Lent he said (and from the altar, note you, by leave of the bishop), that he had seen St. Lawrence standing glorified in the air, who held a banner, and that Huesca would be ours and Christ’s at last.”
The lord smiled. “These things are lies,” he said.
“Was not Huesca the town of the great St. Lawrence,” answered the farmer doggedly, “whom the Emperor of the Romans, possessed by a devil, roasted upon a gridiron for the Faith? Will he not lead the host into Huesca at last? And then all the plains will be before us, whereon we can call upon St. James, and charge!”
But the lord still shook his head and smiled unpleasantly.
“All these things are lies,” he said. “But whatever great lord shall ride at last into Huesca for Christ, and cleanse it of the infidel, shall not only conquer it for Christ but for himself. Sancho is our great master, whom we serve, but whoever can hold Huesca will be a little king all the same.”
The farmer looked back up the narrow street to the mountains, and he said, “The lords come riding in from the Major Land, from the broad Christian land that goes up and away northward for ever beyond the hills; they come in greater and in greater bands with every season; they are strong men heavily accoutred. With their aid we shall take Huesca.”
“But this season,” laughed the lord again, “we shall not take more than a farm, nor raid more than an orchard, nor carry much home beyond a few apples, and a little wheat perhaps from the first plough lands of the infidels in the plain.”
By this time it was full day. There was a new warmth in the air, and the noise of the torrent seemed louder under the growing light. The torrent, roaring southward, seemed, with its adventure and its plunge, a sort of leader; and these mounted men, now gathering into column for the raid, thought of the south and of the stony path that led along its banks on, away, over the ford to Jaca: and thence to the plains and the battle. The torrent of Aragon is a maker of kingdoms and of soldiers destined to conquer. Though as yet these Christians had but a few bare parishes of land, hardly held by day and by night with arms, and the little town of Jaca only for their bastion, yet in them all, whether doubters or visionaries, there lay smouldering some certitude of future things, and a promise of the reconquest of Spain beyond and of the freeing of all Christian land.
So they rode out, in number about four hundred and fifty mounted men, with many more afoot that made a straggling herd about them and behind them. So they filed out by the southern gate.
The priests and the women watched them as they went by, and so did the children in the crowd. There were shrill cries of prophecy and of warning. To the last of them that rode by a deacon held up the relic of St. Lawrence, which was a piece of cloth from his tunic. The armed man bent over the saddle on the near side and kissed it as he passed.
Their marching raised a cloud of dust that blew softly away to the southward under the summer air, and in a little while the noise of the horses’ hoofs was lost, and the little place was quiet again.
There was a woman, one of those that had ridden in with the mules. She stood now by the fountain filling a leathern gourd with water and crooning a song of the Basques. For she was of the Basque country, to the east, an unconquered tribe. And with her was her little son, four years old, who held her skirts and watched the cool, clear water running into the gourd.
“Mother,” he said, “where do all those tall gentlemen go?”
“They go to fight against the men in white cloaks,” she said, “the men who serve Mahound. They go to catch them in their camps, and to bring us home good things—as it says in the song that we sing on winter evenings,” and she crooned the tune to him.
The little child said, “Mother, what is Mahound?”
“Mahound,” said the woman, “is a great beast that lives in an island of the sea. He has a head like a goat, and great shining eyes.”
The child looked at her, glorying and delighting to hear the story again. “And are not his eyes jewels?” he said.
“Yes, baby,” said the woman, “great jewels from the East, such as there are in kings’ crowns, in the crown of Sancho our king, or in the middle of that cross which the archbishop bore before him in the procession when he came down this Lent from Toulouse with the great lords of the north who were riding to help Leon.”
“And mother,” went on the child again, “is there not a fire behind those eyes of Mahound, and has he not great gilded horns, and does he not prophesy from his goat’s mouth?”
He continued to recite all the tale that he knew so well.
“Yes, baby,” said the mother (the gourd was filled, and she was leading him away by the hand), “and this beast is black all over, whence they that worship him, the Moriscos, are dark also, and they grin with white, shining teeth like his. And between him and his followers and our Christ and His Blessed Mother and His Saints there is perpetual war.”
As the child so babbled, and as the woman answered him, there still ran, with its triumphant noise below the houses, the thundering torrent. The little child caught between two walls the glint of its water foaming under the sun.
“Mother,” he said, “what is the name of that water?”
She answered in a more solemn tone, “Its name is Aragon, a famous water; the sick bathe in it and are healed, and from all time it has baptized Christian men.”
When this child was grown a man, though he was a serf’s child he became skilful in the riding and the management of a horse and in the handling even of arms, which the young free men lent him for a jest in the village games. So at last he went riding as a companion with one from his village, and was enfranchised. And by the time that he had taken his farm from his father and had himself bred a son, he followed the Cid Campeador. At last he, too, grew old. He came back to his farm to sit by the fire; and his son in turn tilled the land of those few acres in the hills, and rode out every season farther and farther south against the oppressors, cleansing the land. Until there came the rumour of a great marching that was going eastward to the Holy Places for the recovery of Christ’s grave, and this son of his, following that rumour, begged of his old father a little store of gold which he had put by, and went out himself upon Crusade, leaving the old man by the fire in the Pyrenees.